shoulder and the trigger drawn; before I heard the crack I saw him
cringe; and, as the white smoke drifted off to leeward, he fell heavily,
completely riddled by the shot, into the brake before me; while at the
same moment, whir-r-r! up sprung a bevy of twenty quail, at least,
startling me for the moment by the thick whirring of their wings, and
skirring over the underwood right toward Archer. "Mark, quail!" I
shouted, and, recovering instantly my nerves, fired my one remaining
barrel after the last bird! It was a long shot, yet I struck him fairly,
and he rose instantly right upward, towering high! high! into the clear
blue sky, and soaring still, till his life left him in the air, and he
fell like a stone, plump downward!

"Mark him! Tim!"

"Ey! ey! sur. He's a de-ad un, that's a sure thing!"

At my shot all the bevy rose a little, yet altered not their course the
least, wheeling across the thicket directly round the front of Archer,
whose whereabout I knew, though I could neither see nor hear him. So
high did they fly that I could observe them clearly, every bird well
defined against the sunny heavens. I watched them eagerly. Suddenly one
turned over; a cloud of feathers streamed off down the wind; and then,
before the sound of the first shot had reached my ears, a second pitched
a few yards upward, and, after a heavy flutter, followed its hapless
comrade.

Turned by the fall of the two leading birds, the bevy again wheeled,
still rising higher, and now flying very fast; so that, as I saw by the
direction which they took, they would probably give Draw a chance of
getting in both barrels. And so indeed it was; for, as before, long ere
I caught the booming echoes of his heavy gun, I saw two birds keeled
over, and, almost at the same instant, the cheery shout of Tim announced
to me that he had bagged my towered bird! After a little pause, again we
started, and, hailing one another now and then, gradually forced our way
through brake and brier toward the outward verge of the dense covert.
Before we met again, however, I had the luck to pick up a third
woodcock, and as I heard another double shot from Archer, and two single
bangs from Draw, I judged that my companions had not been less
successful than myself. At last, emerging from the thicket, we all
converged, as to a common point, toward Tim; who, with his game-bag on
the ground, with its capacious mouth wide open to receive our game, sat
on a stump with the two se